Remarks on the treatment of piles and allied affections, including pruritus ani / by T. Lauder Brunton.

  • Brunton, Thomas Lauder, Sir, 1844-1916.
Date:
[1892]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the treatment of piles and allied affections, including pruritus ani / by T. Lauder Brunton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    f EEMAEKS ON THE TEEATMENT OF PILES AND ALLIED AFFECTIONS, INCLUDING PEUEITUS ANIA By T, LAUDER BRUNTON, M.D., D.Sc. Edin., LL.D. Hon. Aber., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. SoJiE diseases are important on account of their severity and of the danger to life which they occasion, others are important on account of their frequency and the amount of annoyance they cause to the patient. It is only in rare cases that piles cause any danger whatever to life, but they are so exceedingly common, so very annoying to the patient, so destructive of his comfort and occasionally of his temper, that they acquire an importance which justifies me, I think, in bringing the subject of their treatment before you to-night. I shall not attempt to deal with the surgical treatment of this disease, nor can I hope to give you anythinc very new or very striking in regard to the medical treatment. I rather hope to bring together some simple methods of treatment, preventive and curative, and by exciting discussion on the subject to elicit other methods, some of which may be known to one and some to another practitioner, but which, I think, are not all in common use together. I need not enter minutely into the pathology of piles, which is fully treated in works on diseases of the rectum ; I may merely remind you that they consist essentially of a dilated or varicose condition of the vessels, the arteries, capillaries, and especially the veins of the rectum, which are embedded in cellular tissue of a loose and yielding character, and are covered either by the mucous membrane of the rectum, by the skin outside the anus, or partly by the mucous membrane and partly by the skin, according as they are internal, external, or intermedia] (or complicated, as they are termed by Mr. Allingham). The blood from these veins re- turns in a twofold way into the general circulation. Part of it flows through the anastomoses of the haemorrhoidal with the tile British Medical Journal, March 12, 1892, ' Reprinted from